“Isaac and Caleb. Well, to be accurate, Caleb hadn’t been born yet, but I was in my ninth month. My husband Barry was a firefighter. Or maybe he still is. How can I know? Anyway, we’d just purchased our first house—a little place, a lot smaller than this house. Barry was working a lot, trying to pick up extra hours to pay for all the things we needed. I was trying to get as much unpacking done as I could, but Isaac was only three at that time, so trying to keep up with him and set up house while I was as big as a house myself, well, it tired me out. Plus, about that time Isaac had been suffering from…bad dreams. That must be how it got me…”

Joyce’s voice dissipated like wind-scattered smoke. Several moments were spent on a vacant stare that made Morgan both heartsick and frightened.

“I remember,” Joyce resumed, “I’d just put Isaac down for his afternoon nap. I was going to finish unboxing our kitchenware, but I was just so exhausted. I curled up right beside Isaac.”

Morgan interjected with a rush of apologies. “You don’t have to relive this,” she told her.

But Joyce’s recollection was immune to protest. “We had an antique clock,” she continued, “an heirloom. It was inside one of the open boxes in our bedroom. It was a pretty thing, with Roman numerals on the face and little brass chimes that rang on the hour. Anyway, the house was so quiet that day that all I could hear was the refrigerator buzzing in the kitchen and the ticking of that pretty little clock. As a matter of fact, I pulled that ticking sound into my dream.

“I must have dozed off fairly quickly, and the nightmare came right away. In it, I was walking up a steep country road. The incline was so extreme that I could barely climb it. At one point my legs gave out. I fell down but I still couldn’t stop climbing. I began to crawl, to pull myself along the asphalt, looking up to the top of the road.

“The sun was very white. It hurt to look upward, but I could just make out that there was a silhouette at the top of the hill. It took what felt like forever before I was able to make out what it was—a stuffed chair, a wingback, antique…but battered. The chair was turned away from me. When I got a bit closer, I could see that something was sitting in that chair. There were spiky tufts of hair sticking up above the back. The upholstery was blue with a very ugly pattern of gold running through it, a zigzag thing that made me nauseous if I looked at it for too long.